Corsham's schools are good, and choosing one is refreshingly simple. Across the county, better than eight in ten graded schools are good or better. The primaries are a short walk from most homes. There's one state secondary, and it carries the town's name. The difficult part isn't finding a decent school. It's getting a place at the one you want.
Ofsted has graded 128 schools across Wiltshire, and 106 of them are good or better, which is a little over four in five. Six are outstanding, 100 are good, 20 require improvement and 2 are inadequate. These counts cover the whole local authority, not only Corsham, so read them as the standard of the wider system this town sits in rather than a report on its own classrooms. Another 73 settings hold no published grade at all. They're not-yet-graded, not failing, and they sit outside those totals.
A school being named on this page doesn't mean your child gets a place there. Wiltshire allocates places by its own admissions rules, and those rules don't care how much you paid for the house or how close the estate agent said it was. The buyers who check the admissions criteria before they exchange contracts sleep better than the ones who find out in the offer letter.
The Corsham School is the town's only state secondary. It opened as a comprehensive in 1972 and is now an academy with a sixth form, so a child can start at eleven and stay until they leave school without ever changing buses. At primary level, The Corsham Regis Primary Academy takes its name from the town's old "Corsham Regis" title, claimed through a reputed link to the Saxon king Ethelred of Wessex. It's a grand name for somewhere that teaches phonics, and every child who goes there will be told about the king at least once. Neston Primary School serves the Neston side of things, and Corsham Primary School and St Patrick's Catholic Primary School, Corsham round out the local set. Box Church of England Primary School, outside the parish, also takes Corsham children.
For parents who'd rather pay, Heywood Prep occupies a Grade II Georgian building of Bath stone dating from 1776, close to Corsham Court, on a site the Domesday Book mentions as a priory. Plenty of private schools claim history. Few can point to a mention in a survey ordered by William the Conqueror.
The town's schooling goes back a long way. Lady Margaret Hungerford endowed a school as part of her almshouses in 1668. In 1816 Paul Cobb Methuen, lord of the manor, built a new schoolroom on Lacock Road. That Grade II listed building is still standing and is now used for further education. In Corsham even the old classrooms get listed.
The distances are short. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest primary about 8 minutes away by car, 12 by public transport and 15 on foot. The nearest secondary is about 9 minutes by car, 16 by public transport and 19 on foot. That makes the school run in Corsham a walk rather than a military operation, which is more than many Wiltshire parents can say.
Schools are one of Corsham's real strengths. They sit inside a county system that grades most of its schools good or better, and with one secondary in town, the choice is made for you.